Chose a good topic for me - Essay Example

The key areas to be discussed include the style of love represented in the relationships, the stages, defense mechanism, conflict, power, self disclosure and interpersonal needs theory. The movie Five Year Engagement was released in 2012 and was among the top 100 box office movies. This film is a story of love and how life’s unpredictability makes it hard for the two lovers who are the main characters in this movie to get married. The movie starts with Tom proposing to Violet and the two live together happily this being a sign of a good marriage.

However, it seems like luck is not on their way as Violet who is research psychologist gets a job offer in another state. Tom leaves his job as a chef hence their wedding has to be postponed. With Violet working in her dream job and Tom having abandoned his, the two grow apart slowly and eventually break up after Violet was involved in an affair with her boss. Tom goes back to his old job in San Francisco and even gets a younger girlfriend. After being apart for a long time, the two get back together and this time around they do not waste time and immediately get married.

The kind of love that is mainly displayed by Tom and Violet is Eros. This is because they are strongly attracted to each other and are very romantic especially in the beginning of the movie and at the end. At some point, this love is seen to be storge type after they had been together for a long time and passion between them had died. Violet sees Tom more as a friend than a lover and this leads to their break up (West et al, 15). This relationship goes through several stages of love. At the beginning of the film, the two are in the experimenting stage.

They have started living together and are happy as a couple. Tom proposes to Violet and they believe that a marriage between them would definitely work. After the couple moved to Ann Arbor and Violet extended the time she was to work at the University of Michigan, the relationship stopped growing. It was in the stagnation stage and they eventually broke up. The type of Gibbs pairing in this film can be identified as superiority vs. equality. When the couple was in San Francisco, none felt superior or inferior to the other.

Tom was doing very well as the chief chef and Violet was also doing well in her career. There was no conflict in this area. However, when they moved to Ann Arbor, Tom’s life stagnated. He could not get a job with the same status as the one he had in San Francisco and he eventually decided not to work at all. He became disoriented in life and could not even remember to trim his hair. Violet on the other hand progressed in her career (West et al, 13). This made them incompatible with Violet becoming attracted to her boss Prof. Winton. In this situation, Tom was the one losing from the relationship but did not find a way of expressing his displeasure.

He used the defense mechanism of psychological withdrawal. He started being careless with himself even neglecting to groom himself. He would even stay in the house without pants watching TV and was disconnect from reality. At one point, he was left to look after his nephew but he was completely taken away by his games that he left the child to get close to some dangerous hunting objects and this resulted in a person being hurt. Escaping from reality helped him avoid the troubling facts that reality offered.

It is evident that Tom and Violet dealt with their conflict through denial and suppression and